Getting a foothold in the tech startup world takes a lot. Dedication, vision, the right people, and cash. As unfortunate as it may seem, hundreds of brilliant tech ideas have never gotten off the ground because of restricted cash flow. Companies that use traditional SQL databases as their digital architecture can be paying thousands upon thousands per month. That may be fine when you’re Airbnb or YouTube, but when you’re the new kid on the block, it can be a resources suck that drags you under.

Enter
Apache Cassandra, a NoSQL database that offers a host of brilliant features for new startups, including the wallet-friendly fact that it’s open source.

Yep. Apache Cassandra — developed by the geniuses at Facebook in 2008 — is completely DIY, meaning startups can put their precious resources into what’s going to give them an edge, as opposed to what they need just to get their foot in the door. The database also offers a host of benefits over traditional databases, including security, resilience, high performance and scalability. It is a database that has truly changed the lives of tech works. If you’re after a digital architecture that will allow you to make your business grow, Apache Cassandra is for you.

Resilience

A new tech startup needs digital architecture that not only is affordable,
but offers superior resistance to damage. Apache Cassandra’s peer-to-peer arrangement eliminates single points-of-failure threats by sharing data among peers. This architecture is a marked improvement on the traditional master-slave format. When all requests are made to a master server, the entire system is vulnerable to failure because if the master server is affected, then the slave servers can also be affected.

Cassandra also utilities cloud technology to improve resilience. By distributing cluster servers across cloud provider failure zones, servers are grouped within clusters where the likelihood of a failure is correlated. That means if a group of servers fail, the entire infrastructure doesn’t.

Grow With Your Ambition

As previously mentioned, an open source database is perfect for new startups that are struggling to compete with the resources of the big players. But what happens when you’re ready to grow? Do you have to completely rebuild your database?

Not at all. Apache Cassandra offers rapid scalability, something that isn’t always doable with traditional databases. Because Cassandra’s peer-to-peer format has equal nodes, nodes can request or share data at any time, or be replaced or added within a cluster with no interruption to the service.

Not only does this lend itself to rapid scalability, but it also for simple maintenance once the database is being widely used.

Handling Big Data

Apache Cassandra’s method of storing data makes it particularly ideal for new startups that will be looking to work with huge amounts of data. Cassandra has no limit on the types of data you can store together, which means you can store data in one place without having to define the type of data in advance.

That makes the database perfect for working with large amounts of unstructured data (and also explains why it’s used by numerous data-heavy apps including Instagram and Spotify). And because Cassandra doesn’t manage stored data through complex configurations (all data is in a cluster where nodes are equal), data management is much simpler. If you’re migrating data from an existing database, it could be worth speaking with an experienced service provider.

Apache Cassandra's use of clusters also differs from traditional databases, which usually rely on expensive servers and storage systems. This gives Cassandra a much cheaper cost per gigabyte and transaction speed, meaning you’re able to process and store more data for less (perfect for a startup!). Cassandra can be run on Amazon Web Services (a cloud-based platform called
AWS Cassandra for short). This service is popular way for new tech companies that need to handle Big Data in an economical way.

Join The Community

Even taking into accounts its resilience, scalability, and innovative data storage technology, one of the best things about Apache Cassandra is the substantial online community of other users who offer support and advice. There is a huge community of like-minded users who support each other, share views, queries and suggestions. That exists because Apache Cassandra is open source, and available to everyone.